How to submit a guest column for Education Lab

The Seattle Times welcomes submissions of guest commentaries for the Education Lab Blog.

To be seriously considered, a submission should make a strong solution-oriented argument about education and be between 300 and 500 words in length. We give highest priority to local writers writing about local topics.

We require first-publication rights for print and online to all of our submissions. If your op-ed has been published elsewhere in print, on a personal blog or on Facebook, we will not be able to use it.

When we use a freelance article from you, you retain ownership of any copyright to the article and the right to resell it, subject to our right to edit, publish, republish, and reproduce the article in publications and reprints of The Seattle Times Company and its subsidiaries and affiliates. This includes non-exclusive rights to use the article, in whole or in part, in electronic media, including searchable databases and electronic publications in any form and medium, which may include commercial database services where your work may be individually accessed.

If you have written for us before, please note that we do not run op-eds by the same writer within a 30-day period.

How to submit

We prefer submissions to be made by email. To ensure your submission will be considered in the most timely fashion, please send it to community engagement editor Caitlin Moran: cmoran@seattletimes.com.

Please include the text of the submission in the body of the email or in an attached Microsoft Word document. Please do not send us files in PDF format.

Please include the author’s name and topic in the subject line of the email. We do not publish op-eds written anonymously or under pseudonyms.

Please include a headshot of the author, minimum size 30 KB, and a biography of 30 words or fewer

DO be civil. It’s perfectly appropriate to strongly criticize ideas, reasoning or positions that you disagree with. But it is not appropriate to make personal attacks.

DO present the case from the top down. It’s usually better to begin with the premise of your opinion rather than assembling the facts and presenting a conclusion at the end.

DO be timely.

DO be patient. We usually work at least a week in advance.

DO be willing to submit photos, videos graphs and charts. They help explain the issue and often enhance the visual presentation.

DON’T submit op-eds that are written by organizations and then shopped around for an author or authors. That’s a petition, not an op-ed. We do not publish guest columns in Education Lab written by more than one author.

DON’T submit a long op-ed and ask for an editor to review it before being willing to cut it to meet the requested word limit. To be taken seriously, the op-ed should fall within the guideline of between 300 and 500 words.

DON’T key the op-ed off an invented “public awareness” event. Indeed there might be something valuable and newsworthy to say about issues related to those or other areas, but the op-ed will be judged on its authentic news value, not on a created awareness event.

DON’T demand review of editing or headlines. Most editors are willing to discuss editing changes for brevity or clarity but are seldom patient with nitpicks. Titles on articles submitted are rarely used because of specific formatting requirements for print and digital publication. Headlines are written by someone who specializes in that skill.

DON’T submit the same piece to different publications at the same time. Editors hate to see a piece on their desk appear in another print or online publication. As a general rule, ride one horse at a time.

Stories in the series

When tackling the topic of student discipline, some of the country’s toughest schools have done a turnaround. Instead of focusing on rules broken, they now ask kids to confront themselves. The result? Fewer suspensions and new perspective on the point of school itself. Read the story →

It stands to reason: Kick troubled students out of school and they often come back even worse. The Kent School District is trying to tackle this national problem by overhauling the way it handles discipline. But its answers spark even more questions. Read the story →

In an idea borrowed from college athletics, the University of Washington boosts promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — with an extra year of academic work. Read the story →

Boosting the quality of preschool in Seattle could help children, and the city as a whole. A number of studies, including one from the ’60s, establish that potential. But there is no guarantee of success. Read the story →

Universal, free preschool in Tulsa, Okla., has produced results attracting national attention, and could be a blueprint for Seattle. But after 16 years the long-term outcomes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read the story →

Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district’s efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. Read the story →

A new focus on individualized advice and counseling, boosted by software tools, is helping hundreds more students earn degrees and certificates each year at Walla Walla Community College. Read the story →

The path to college often leaves disadvantaged students behind. Two unusual nonprofits, one based in Seattle, have helped vault thousands of low-income students onto university campuses. Read the story →

In an attempt to add depth to the curriculum in America's most popular advanced high-school courses, some local teachers threw out most of their lectures and replaced them with a series of projects. Results so far are encouraging. Read the story →

Western Washington University college students are working as mentors, tutors and role models for thousands of K-12 students in and around Bellingham. The goal: convince them that college should be part of their educational trajectory. Read the story →

Kent educators combed through transcripts and discovered 2,600 young people in their district without any kind of diploma or credential. Enter iGrad, a program linking dropouts with college, that has been flooded with kids who want a second chance. Read the story →

A community group in northwest Chicago has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models and leaders by tapping into strengths many don't realize they have. Read the story →

Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools. Read the story →

For years, students at White Center Heights Elementary logged some of the lowest test scores in King County. Then teachers tried something new, and the numbers soared by double-digits after just one year. So what happened, and could it be replicated elsewhere? Read the story →

About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.